A Town Like Alice

by Nevil Shute

  The baby, curiously, gave them the least anxiety of any of the children. They fed it on rice and gravy from the fish soup or stew, and it did well. Once in the six weeks it had seemed to be developing dysentery and they had given it a tiny dose or two of Glauber’s salt, and it recovered. Mosquitoes never seemed to worry it, and it had not had fever. The other children were less fortunate. Both had had dysentery from time to time, and though they seemed now to be free of it they had gone very thin.

  They slept that night in the bungalow that had belonged to the manager of the Bakri tin mine, an Englishman. In the seven or eight weeks since he had abandoned it it had been occupied by troops of both sides and looted by the Malays; now little remained of it but the bare walls. Marvellously, however, the bath was still in order though filthily dirty, and there was a store of cut wood for the furnace that heated water. The sergeant, true to his promise, allowed them a day of rest here, and they made the most of the hot water for washing their clothes and themselves. With the small improvement in conditions their spirits revived.

  ‘I should think there’d be hot water on the ship,’ said Mrs Holland. ‘There usually is, isn’t there?’

  They marched again next day to a place called Dilit; this was mostly a day spent marching down cart tracks in the rubber plantations. The tracks were mostly in the shade of the trees and this made it pleasant for them, and even the older women found the day bearable. They had some difficulty in finding the way. The sergeant spoke little Malay and had difficulty in understanding the Malay women latex-tappers that he asked for directions from time to time. Jean found that she could understand the answers that the women gave, and could converse with them, but having got the directions they required she had some difficulty in making the sergeant understand. They reached an agreement by the end of the day that she should talk to the women, who talked to her less shyly in any case, and she developed a sign language which the sergeant understood. From that time onwards Jean was largely responsible for finding the shortest way for the party to go.

  In the middle of the afternoon Ben Collard, the younger son of Mrs Collard who had died, trod on something while walking barefoot in the grass that bit him with poison fangs and got away. He said afterwards that it looked like a big beetle; possibly it was a scorpion. Mrs Horsefall took charge and laid him on the ground and sucked the wound to draw the poison from it, but the foot swelled quickly and the inflammation travelled up the leg to the knee. It was obviously painful and he cried a great deal. There was nothing to be done but carry him, and this was no easy matter for the women in their feeble condition because he was a boy of seven and weighed five stone. Mrs Horsefall carried him for an hour and after that the sergeant took him and carried him the rest of the way. By the time they got to Dilit the ankle was enormous and the knee was stiff.

  At Dilit there was no accommodation for them and no food. The place was a typical Malay village, the houses built of wood and palm thatch raised about four feet from the ground on posts, leaving a space beneath where dogs slept and fowls nested. They stood or sat wearily while the sergeant negotiated with the Malay headman: very soon he called for Jean, and she joined the tri-lingual discussion. The village had rice and could prepare a meal for them, but the headman wanted payment, and was only with difficulty induced to agree to provide rice for so many on the word of the sergeant that they would be paid some day. As regards accommodation he said flatly that there was none, and the party must sleep under the houses with the dogs and poultry; later he agreed to move the people from one house, so that the thirty prisoners had a roof to sleep under on a floor about fifteen feet square.

  Jean secured a corner for their party, and Eileen Holland settled into it with the children and the baby. A few feet from them Mrs Horsefall was working on Ben Collard. Somebody had some permanganate crystals and someone else an old razor blade; with this they cut the wound open a little, in spite of the child’s screams, and put in crystals and bound it up; then they applied hot fomentations. There was nothing Jean could do, and she wandered outside.

  There was a sort of village kitchen, and here the Japanese private was superintending the activities of women of the village who were preparing rice. At a house nearby the headman was sitting at the head of the steps leading up to his house, squatting on his heels and smoking a long pipe: he was a grey-haired old man wearing a sarong and what once had been a khaki drill jacket. Jean crossed to him and said rather shyly in Malay, ‘I am sorry we have been forced to come here, and have made trouble for you.’

  He stood up and bowed to the Mem. ‘It is no trouble,’ he said. ‘We are sorry to see Mems in such a state. Have you come far?’

  She said, ‘From Bakri today.’

  He made her come up into the house: there was no chair and she sat with him on the floor at the doorless entrance. He asked their history, and she told him what had happened, and he grunted. Presently the wife came from within the house bearing two cups of coffee without sugar or milk; Jean thanked her in Malay, and she smiled shyly, and withdrew into the house again.

  Presently the headman said, ‘The Short One’ – he meant the Japanese sergeant – ‘says you must stay here tomorrow.’

  Jean said, ‘We are too weak to march each day. The Japanese allow us to rest a day between each day of marching. If we may stay here tomorrow it will help us a great deal. The sergeant says he can get money for the food.’

  ‘The Short Ones never pay for food,’ the headman said. ‘Nevertheless you shall stay.’

  She said, ‘I can do nothing but thank you.’

  He raised his grey old head. ‘It is written in the Fourth Surah, “Men’s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do”.’

  She sat with the old man till rice was ready; then she left him and went to her meal. The other women looked at her curiously. ‘I saw you sitting with the headman, chatting away,’ said one. ‘Just as if you were old chums.’

  Jean smiled. ‘He gave me a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Just fancy that! There’s something in knowing how to talk to them in their own language, isn’t there? What did he talk about?’

  Jean thought for a minute. ‘This and that – about our journey. He talked about God a little.’

  The women stared at her. ‘You mean, his own God? Not the real God?’

  ‘He didn’t differentiate,’ Jean said. ‘Just God.’

  They rested all next day and then marched to Klang, three or four miles outside Port Swettenham. Little Ben Collard was neither better nor worse: the leg was very much swollen. The chief trouble with him now was physical weakness: he had eaten nothing since the injury for nothing would stay down, and none of the children by that time had any reserves of strength. The headman directed the villagers to make a litter for him in the form of a stretcher of two long bamboo poles with spreaders and a woven palm mat between and they put him upon this and took turns at carrying it.

  They got to Klang that afternoon, and here there was an empty schoolhouse: the sergeant put them into this and went off to a Japanese encampment near at hand, to report and to arrange rations for them.

  Presently an officer arrived to inspect them, marching at the head of a guard of six soldiers. This officer, whom they came to know as Major Nemu, spoke good English. He said, ‘Who are you people? What do you want here?’

  They stared at him. Mrs Horsefall said, ‘We are prisoners, from Panong. We are on our way to the prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore. Captain Yoniata in Panong sent us here under guard, to be put on a ship to Singapore.’

  ‘There are no ships here,’ he said. ‘You should have stayed in Panong.’

  It was no good arguing, nor had they the energy. ‘We were sent here,’ she repeated dully.

  ‘They had no right to send you here,’ he said angrily. ‘There is no prison camp here.’

  There was a long, awkward silence: the women stared at him in blank despair. Mrs Ho
rsefall summoned up her flagging energy again. ‘May we see a doctor?’ she asked. ‘Some of us are very ill – one child especially. One woman died upon the way.’

  ‘What did she die of?’ he asked quickly. ‘Plague?’

  ‘Nothing infectious. She died of exhaustion.’

  ‘I will send a doctor to examine you all. You will stay here for tonight, but you cannot stay for long. I have not got sufficient rations for my own command, let alone feeding prisoners.’ He turned and walked back to the camp.

  A new guard was placed upon the schoolhouse: they never saw the friendly sergeant or the private again. Presumably they were sent back to Panong. A Japanese doctor, very young, came to them within an hour; he had them all up one by one and examined them for infectious disease. Then he was about to take his departure, but they made him stay and look at little Ben Collard’s leg. He ordered them to continue with the hot fomentations. When they asked if he could not be taken into hospital he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I inquire.’

  They stayed in that schoolhouse under guard, day after day. On the third day they sent for the doctor again, for Ben Collard was obviously worse. Reluctantly the doctor ordered his removal to the hospital in a truck. On the sixth day they heard that he had died.

  Jean Paget crouched down on the floor beside the fire in my sitting-room; outside a change of wind had brought the London rain beating against the window.

  ‘People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had,’ she said quietly, staring into the embers. ‘They don’t know what it was like, not being in a camp.’

  3

  They stayed in Klang eleven days, not knowing what was to become of them. The food was bad and insufficient, and there were no shops in the vicinity: if there had been shops they could not have done much with them, because their money was now practically gone. On the twelfth day Major Nemu paraded them at half an hour’s notice, allocated one corporal to look after them, and told them to walk to Port Dickson. He said that there might be a ship there to take them down to Singapore; if there was not they would be walking in the general direction of the prison camps.

  That was about the middle of March 1942. From Klang to Port Dickson is about fifty miles, but by this time they were travelling more slowly than ever. It took them till the end of the month; they had to wait several days in one village because Mrs Horsefall went down with malaria and ran a temperature of a hundred and five for some time. She recovered and was walking, or rather tottering, within a week, but she never recovered her vigour and from that time onwards the leadership fell more and more upon Jean’s shoulders.

  By the time they reached Port Dickson their clothes were in a deplorable condition. Very few of the women had a change of any sort, because burdens had been reduced to an absolute minimum. Jean and Mrs Holland had nothing but the thin cotton frocks that they had worn since they were taken; these were now torn and ragged from washing. Jean had gone barefoot since the early stages of the march and intended to go on without shoes: she now took another step towards the costume of the Malay woman. She sold a little brooch for thirteen dollars to an Indian jeweller in Salak, and with two of the precious dollars she bought a cheap sarong.

  A sarong is a skirt made of a tube of cloth about three feet in diameter; you get into it and wrap it round your waist like a towel, the surplus material falling into pleats that permit free movement. When you sleep you undo the roll around your waist and it then lies over you as a loose covering that you cannot roll out of. It is the lightest and coolest of all garments for the tropics, and the most practical, being simple to make and to wash. For a top, she cut down her cotton frock into a sort of tunic which got rid of the most tattered part, the skirt, and from that time she was cooler and more at ease than any of them. At first the other women strongly disapproved of this descent to native dress: later most of them followed her example as their clothes became worn out.

  There was no haven for them at Port Dickson, and no ship. They were allowed to stay there, living under desultory guard in a copra barn, for about ten days; the Japanese commander then decided that they were a nuisance, and put them on the road to Seremban. He reasoned, apparently, that they were not his prisoners and so not his responsibility; it was the duty of those who had captured them to put them into a camp. His obvious course was to get rid of them and get them out of his area before, by their continued presence, they forced him to divert food and troops and medical supplies from the Imperial Japanese Army to sustain them.

  At Siliau, between Port Dickson and Seremban, tragedy touched the Holland family, because Jane died. They had stayed for their day of rest in a rubber-smoking shed: she had developed fever during the day’s march and one of the two Japanese guards they had at that time had carried her for much of the day. Their thermometer had been broken in an accident a few days before and they had now no means of telling the temperature of malaria patients, but she was very hot. They had a little quinine left and tried to give it to her, but they could not get her to take much of it till she grew too weak to resist, and then it was too late. They persuaded the Japanese sergeant to allow them to stay at Siliau rather than to risk moving the child, and Jean and Eileen Holland stayed up with her, sleepless, fighting for her life in that dim, smelly place where the rats scurried round at night and hens walked in and out by day. On the evening of the second day she died.

  Mrs Holland stood it far better than Jean had expected that she would. ‘It’s God’s will, my dear,’ she said quietly, ‘and He’ll give her Daddy strength to bear it when he hears, just as He’s giving us all strength to bear our trials now.’ She stood dry-eyed beside the little grave, and helped to make the little wooden cross. Dry-eyed she picked the text for the cross: ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me’. She said quietly, ‘I think her Daddy would like that one.’

  Jean woke that night in the darkness, and heard her weeping.

  Through all this the baby, Robin, throve. It was entirely fortuitous that he ate and drank nothing but food that had been recently boiled; living on rice and soup, that happened automatically, but may have explained his relative freedom from stomach disorders. Jean carried him every day, and her own health was definitely better than when they had left Panong. She had had five days of fever at Klang, but dysentery had not troubled her for some time, and she was eating well. With the continual exposure to the sun she was getting very brown, and the baby that she carried on her hip got browner.

  Seremban lies on the railway, and they had hoped that when they got there there would be a train down to Singapore. They got to Seremban about the middle of April, but there was no train for them; the railway was running in a limited fashion but probably not through to Singapore. Before very long they were put upon the road to Tampin, but not till they had lost another member of the party.

  Ellen Forbes was the unmarried girl who had come out to get married and hadn’t, a circumstance that Jean could well understand by the time she had lived in close contact with her for a couple of months. Ellen was a vacuous, undisciplined girl, good humoured, and much too free with Japanese troops for the liking of the other women. At Seremban they were accommodated in a schoolhouse on the outskirts of the town, which was full of soldiers. In the morning Ellen simply wasn’t there, and they never saw her again.

  Jean and Mrs Horsefall asked to see the officer and stated their case, that a member of their party had disappeared, probably abducted by the soldiers. The officer promised to make inquiries, and nothing happened. Two days later they received orders to march down the road to Tampin, and were moved off under guard.

  They stayed at Tampin for some days, and got so little food there that they practically starved; at their urgent entreaty the local commandant sent them down under guard to Malacca, where they hoped to get a ship. But there was no ship at Malacca and the officer in charge there sent them back to Tampin. They plodded back there in despair; at Alor Gajah Judy Thomson died. To stay at Tampin meant
more deaths, inevitably, so they suggested it was better for them to continue down to Singapore on foot, and a corporal was detailed to take them on the road to Gemas.

  In the middle of May, at Ayer Kuning, on the way to Gemas, Mrs Horsefall died. She had never really recovered from her attack of malaria or whatever fever it was that had attacked her two months previously; she had had recurrent attacks of low fever which had made Jean wonder sometimes if it was malaria that she had had at all. Whatever it was it had made her very weak; at Ayer Kuning she developed dysentery again, and died in two days, probably of heart failure or exhaustion. The faded little woman Mrs Frith, who was over fifty and always seemed to be upon the point of death and never quite made it, took over the care of Johnnie Horsefall and it did her a world of good; from that day Mrs Frith improved and gave up moaning in the night.

  They got to Gemas three days later; here as usual in towns they were put into the schoolhouse. The Japanese town major, a Captain Nisui, came to inspect them that evening; he had known nothing about them till they appeared in his town. This was quite usual and Jean was ready for it; she explained that they were prisoners being marched to camp in Singapore.

  He said, ‘Prisoner not go Singapore. Strict order. Where you come from?’

  She told him. ‘We’ve been travelling for over two months,’ she said, with the calmness borne of many disappointments. ‘We must get into a camp, or we shall die. Seven of us have died upon the road already – there were thirty-two when we were taken prisoner. Now there are twenty-five. We can’t go on like this. We must get into camp at Singapore. You must see that.’

  He said, ‘No more prisoner to Singapore. Very sorry for you, but strict order. Too many prisoner in Singapore.’

  She said, ‘But, Captain Nisui, that can’t mean women. That means men prisoners, surely.’